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A life remembered: A. Rouf Chowdhury

Albab Akanda, Quamrul Haider and Zulfiquar Rahman
IT is hard to write an obituary, especially about someone whom one has known well and has been the proverbial larger-than-life character in one's childhood memories. Abdur Rouf Chowdhury was such a character, a dear friend whose outlook on life was so positive one wondered
whether his drive to succeed was a reflection of keen ambition or simply a challenge to live, and live well. We think it was the latter.
Rouf took an intense interest in everything around him — books, music, sports, politics, and, of course, people. He was particular about friendships, and loyalty to his friends was a distinctive trait throughout his life. We knew Rouf for almost 50 years as part of a close group of friends. The memories are many, from countless school-hours of harmless intellectual pretensions to canteen addas that even included Reader's Digest word power sessions. The strength of his friendship was evident when, even with many years of only occasional contact, he still made the effort to look us up wherever we were — Washington D.C., California, and New York. Albab recalls that in 1985, a rain-soaked Rouf, together with his lovely wife, Rafia, came by his home in Falls Church and left a gold coin for his son that he keeps among valuable memories.
Rouf had a great sense of humour and always had a ready joke, often leaving us in stitches from bouts of laughter. The smile belied his true capabilities. He had confidence borne of strong intellect and wide reading. He thought clearly and logically, but was never distant. He carried that logic into many riotous rubbers of bridge. True, Rouf had opinions, and fairly strong ones, on a variety of issues, often delivered at school debates in clipped English, skills later honed by his undergraduate years at Oxford. That he was intolerant of mediocrity was clear in the way in which he dismantled specious arguments, but with no malice or condescension — even though some did see him as mildly arrogant. To our mind, he was caught between the intellectual life that he seemed quietly to hanker for and being a successful and well-regarded businessman, a dilemma that we thought often preoccupied the greatly gifted student that we knew. While he spent time in the Middle East, Rouf preferred Dhaka, building a business at home rather than investing in a life overseas as many of us have done.
Rouf is no longer with us, but we will remember him as warm, kind, generous, good-humoured and welcoming. Our grief at the suddenness of his passing — "Death don't ring no doorbells. Death don't knock" — will be replaced by memories of times past and spent together. Eventually, destiny will unite us with him when once again there will be laughter and recollection. Until then, together with Rafia and his two sons, we mourn the death of a fine man, devoted father and husband, and true friend. We shall always be thankful for the opportunity we had to know Rouf. Cliches, no doubt, but that is how we remember him.
Finally, remembering the legacy of his companionship,
“Mourn — and then onward, there is no returning He guides yefrom the tomb;
His memory now is a tall pillar, burning
Before us in the gloom. ”
The writers live and work in Virginia, New York and Toronto, respectively.